Sandra Bullock as Brownie Wise will take trailblazer's tale to many

"What a lady," Sentinel columnist Don Boyett wrote when Tupperware legend Brownie Wise died in 1992 at age 79. Boyett remembered the time, in the 1950s, when "Brownie" was a household name in Central Florida.

Her story is well told in Bob Kealing's 2008 book "Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers." (Kealing, longtime WESH-Channel 2 reporter by day, writes books in his off-work hours about great stories from our past, including Jack Kerouac's time in Orlando.)

Now, as announced late last month, Sandra Bullock is slated to play Wise in a big-time movie based on Kealing's "Tupperware Unsealed." It's a chance for a wide audience to learn about this fascinating woman who blazed trails for women in business.

'Sunshine Cinderella'

Tagged the "Sunshine Cinderella" in a 1957 Cosmopolitan magazine profile, Wise was the driving force in making Tupperware a household name in the 1950s.

"You can easily argue she was the most important Florida businesswoman of the 20th century," Kealing says.

Wise was the first woman ever to appear on the cover of Business Week, on April 17, 1954. The story said she was a widow, Kealing notes, but she was really a divorced single mom who not too many years before had been a secretary in Detroit.

After her success, she publicized Florida as well as Tupperware. "Brownie Wise really struck on the idea of creating Orlando as a tourism destination," Kealing has said. Wise promoted the idea of "this glamorous place" that Tupperware dealers could visit — paying their own expenses.

Inspiration for an army

In 1954, a Sentinel profile of Wise noted that she served "as the inspiration for a vast army of 9,000 Tupperware dealers throughout the nation."

Those dealers sold Tupperware on the home-party model, and they sold plenty. If you could peek into all the cupboards in America's kitchens today, you would probably find at least one piece of Tupperware stashed there, possibly even from the Brownie Wise era.

Wise didn't invent home-party sales, but she developed the method to new levels in the 1950s, when the Tupperware party offered women a way into a business world where most doors were shut to women.

Wise had propelled herself ahead in life with a philosophy she described in a 1957 book titled "Best Wishes, Brownie Wise" — "one of the first women's self-help books," Kealing notes.

"Wishing is the art of reacting to the opportunities your ambition uncovers every day," she told her Cosmopolitan interviewer.

Best-selling author Norman Vincent Peale wrote the foreword, describing Tupperware's headquarters on the Orange-Osceola county line as an "inspirational center" in "that beauty spot in Florida."

Beginnings in Orlando

Before Tupperware moved to that headquarters, Wise's home-party empire began in Orlando, where she lived at 303 Dubsdread Circle in 1952.

"When she moved to that home in early '52, the whole of the company operated out of an old airplane hanger," Kealing said recently. "When she left there at the end of '52, the company was well located in the gleaming headquarters it occupies today. ... I think of that iconic photo of Tupper handing Wise the keys to a new car parked in the front yard of that home. It's emblematic of the confidence he had in Wise and how it paid off."

Together, Wise and Tupper formed an odd couple who together built something far beyond the sum of their formidable personalities. "A writer once called them 'a pair of geniuses always on the brink,' " Kealing writes in his book.

Less than a year after her Cosmopolitan profile, Tupper fired Wise and within a few months sold the company he had founded for $16 million. Wise ultimately settled a lawsuit over her separation for about a year's salary: $30,000. She continued to live in Central Florida.

"She had more business sense than a Harvard MBA," Boyett wrote after her death. "She knew people."

Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.